Hanna – The DVDfever Cinema Review – Saoirse Ronan

Hanna: The football season is over for me (my team again hides in mid-table obscurity) so now weekends are going to be spent making sure that I catch up on the everyfilmin2011 quest.

Thus, at 10.45am Mrs W and I were in Cineworld Nottingham. This is when the middle-aged movie geeks come out (then and Sunday morning). They never chat. Perfect. And, to be fair, we both really enjoyed this unusual thriller from Joe Wright with the excellent Saoirse Ronan, the very good Eric Bana and the always-worth-the-ticket-on-her-own Cate Blanchett.
Although, I was a bit baffled as to how it managed to get a 12A certificate. There’s plenty of violence. Indeed, even furry things get the treatment as is evidenced by one of the opening scenes in which our Hanna shoots a deer with an arrow and then a gun and then rips its intestines out.

Hanna and her dad (Bana) live in a forest cottage, deep in an unnamed icy waste, speak with German accents. He has clearly been teaching her to look after herself in the outside world, as well as to be fluent in several languages. Aside of this, her basic knowledge comes from encyclopedias because it becomes clear they have not been part of normal society for some time. Why? Well, that would be giving the game away. But suffice to say that security services (led by dear Cate) are keen to track them down.

When Hanna does go into the real world she finds it a strange place indeed and although she is being relentlessly chased, she does have time for interaction with normal folk. This provides for counterbalancing humour against the darkness of the main storyline.

One family (which includes ex-Coronation Street star Jessica Barden) make particular pals with Hanna are are at the centre of the lighter moments.

Hanna is an intelligent chase movie, it slides easily from the surreal to the everyday and has a neat plot which at first seems to make no sense but, when the strands are tightened, becomes crystal clear.